Historical precedent indeed! I’m going to go way off-topic here, but want to follow this thread of argument. Have you ever seen Adam Curtis’ astounding “Pandora’s Box” series? It details how various 20th century regimes adopted metaphors from science and technology as governing principles. Game Theory for US cold war strategists, mass production for the Soviet Union and even Hydroelectric power for Kwame Nkruma in Ghana.

The thread that runs through the series is that humanity has this persistent tendency to take its latest technological advance as being emblematic of the way the world works and therefore worthy of widespread and general application. (See also Freud’s steam-engine like analogies for the human mind) The series shows that it is not usually the core science or technology that has negative effects, but rather this reapplication of it to other fields e.g. the Soviet Union’s treatment of society as an engineering problem.

As was the steam engine to 19th century thought, the computer to the 20th century, so is the network (or more specifically ‘open-source’) to the 21st century. It’s a seductive idea, one that seems like it will change everything but will also, precedent seems to assure us, be much abused. In that sense it seems to me that Linux and Wikipedia are entirely good things, and that our kids are probably not going to be irrevocably damaged by IM and Twitter’s effect on their attention. However it’s when our schools, governments (and to a lesser extent, corporations) start ‘open-sourcing’ and ‘networking’ things that were never meant to be that way, that the harm will be done.

Now of course hand-wringing over technological change is as fruitless as wide-eyed extropianism. The truth is that a careful and critical adoption of new ideas is always the best way. We need an eye for what we gain, and also what we lose. And hence my use of ‘standout creators’. IIRC, the standard cognitive studies of group performance show that on most tasks, the group outperforms the average individual member of that group but not the strongest individual member. Similarly, the marginal increase in performance of adding an extra member to a group quickly tends to zero once you get above 8 members in standard studies. There are of course conditions under which groups perform very well, and the larger the group the better the performance, but the rule that ‘none of us is as smart as all of us’ is far from being a universal. In many situations one of us is smarter than all of us.

Networked solutions will very likely increase average performance, especially on tasks where steady incremental progress is key (e.g. building software). But similarly they are likely to decrease performance on tasks where flights of inspiration are key. I hate to quote Jaron Lanier on anything (so 90s!) but he wrote a very good article on this a couple of years ago drawing attention to the dark side of networked behaviour, which he called the ‘Digital Maoism’ and drawing some interesting conclusions about which sorts of activities technological collaboration was useful for.

To return to chaos as a tool for creativity, it still seems to me that techniques for coping with technology’s assault on cognition (and for co-opting its effects into creative working) are similar to groups/networks in that they are likely to have a flattening effect on the distribution – less outliers of disaster and genius and an incremental increase in average performance. A hypothetical uncreative individual could be sparked to a surprising place by random chance but a genius might be distracted from hir towering thoughts by an ill-timed tweet or two. Thus these tools democratise creativity to an extent, but via the exact same dynamic are also liable to create a uniformity which due to the comparative nature of creativity can be the enemy of excellence and certainly of competitive difference.

Chances are that new skills will evolve to excel in this milieu (like having good google-fu…) but they’re unlikely to be technological quick-fixes and more likely to be procedural and nuanced in nature.

There has to be a place for counter culture, it’s just a question of when and where it comes into its own. And it’s not for everyone. (I am sure you chose the words ‘standout creators’ carefully, they are a rare breed). Right now, however, networked behaviour is still a (relatively) new phenomenon, which I’d argue we need to be encouraging the majority of people and organisations to adopt, not the reverse. Given the degree of change we face right now there is enormous value in knocking down walls and collaborating to discuss, debate and hopefully solve universal or industry-wide challenges and opportunities as we see them. All of us are better than one of us in this sense. Personally, I also enjoy the open-mindedness, speed of thinking and innovation that collaboration seems to bring along with it. So long as we remember to hang onto our individuality along the way, access to greater diversity of influence probably makes us both more interesting and helps to keep us sane. Even Mann concluded: “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

For what it’s worth, I also agree there comes a point in any creative process when it’s time to focus. The ‘Gen Z’ behaviour David Allen describes in his (great) article to my mind is actually a coping strategy to enable focus, not run away from it. I’d add I think it’s less about a singular episode or particular task (although I accept the execution stage is when focus / the application of craft skills is particularly important), but rather a *series* of punctuation points that need to take place from the very beginning to the very end of the process.

I find Jacob’s first point something I have been debating with recently- having studied Philosophy and Art History most of my life – the importance of context and foundation in thought. With a world of info-sharing and real-time global discussion, when do we have time to sit and really give time to a thought. And not always thoughts that ‘excite us’ right away, but thoughts that one is forced to be with, and chew on, until that ‘aha’ moment erupts –

To the discussions on ‘curiosity’ – I think the culture of ‘curiosity’ is shifting – now what we are ‘curious’ about is not just a solo walk through the park, but rather it is something we RT, FWD, and post – curiosity today is something we use to show the rest of the world that one is noticing quirks and oddities – a kind of badge in a way –

While this profound data-overload is changing our thought-processing and behavior, I think there is room for backlash! I think coming generations may yearn to be totally detached due to overload?

The first is that creativity is essentially comparative. If Basshunter had lived in 1820 and produced the same music, he would have been a towering genius (and thoroughly inexplicable). However in 2009 he’s utterly ordinary (and hopefully forgettable). For artists (commercial or not) to be interesting its important that they follow interesting paths in life, and are exposed to interesting influences that make them different from everyone else. Many experiments confirm the relationship of recent input to creative output, and this was very amusingly and vividly illustrated in the Derren Brown episode where he tricks a pair of advertising creatives into producing a concept that he seeded in their minds via the taxi journey from their office to his. The trouble with Chaos then, is that although it increases any one person’s exposure to random information, it does the exact same thing to everyone, with the effect of smoothing out experience and making it more uniform across the population. If everyone gets their stimulus randomly from the same key start points (google, digg etc. etc.) then uniqueness becomes much more rare.

The second is that inspiration is a small part of the picture, and execution matters at least as much. Focus is far more important in executing well (not least because of the focus required to learn the necessary craft). So, again, it seems likely that wandering attention will mitigate against the creation of quality content.

It’s possible, for these reasons, that the stand-out creators (both individual and corporate) of the future will therefore be rejectors of networks to some extent. Companies who rely on their creativity might be well advised to think about how to buck this trend instead of how to embrace it…

I actually have a similar theory about the two kinds of curiosity that construct creativity — “planned curiosity” (the things we make an effort to learn about, what we are already interested in) and “incidental curiosity” (something intriguing we stumble upon accidentally, something that piques our interest and makes us probe further, discovering unexpected inspiration in the process.) The intersection of the two is when I think true creative genius occurs.

Which, by the way, often makes me question the very concept of a “creative education” — all due respect to the best art and advertising schools, but these are all exercises in “planned curiosity” only. That’s just one half of the story. The same goes for artists who sit around and wait for “the muse” to strike, essentially relying on “incidental curiosity” alone.

That’s precisely why I think there’s tremendous value for this culture of skimmed cultural curation — it affords us the time to explore our planned curiosity while leaving the door ajar for those gusts of incidental curiosity that help us break from plateaus, shift gears and take our creative process in a fresh new direction.